


insomnia

by mercuryhatter



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-02-14 05:50:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2180349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>how do you sleep when you're a Winchester anyway?</p>
            </blockquote>





	insomnia

**Author's Note:**

> now with podfic! http://flawedheartcas.tumblr.com/post/95478768244/emeraldincandescent-so-i-podficced-lees

They were a household full of insomniacs, PTSD- and depression-fueled. Sam actually had the best success sleeping out of all of them, although the way he slept, heavy and deeper than the sea, was alarming in and of itself. For five to eight hours at a time he simply appeared almost dead, centuries of sleep debt to make up in one human lifetime. Dean was the opposite: he would lie stubbornly in bed, face set as if he was trying to dare sleep to come, and if it did, it was inevitably light and fitful. If he wasn’t jerked to wakefulness by some innocuous noise, he would thrash himself free of a nightmare, at which point he would generally give up on sleep entirely and go occupy himself doing something else. Dean was capable of existing this way for weeks at a time before crashing, ten, maybe twelve hours of deep Sam-like sleep, and the cycle began again.

 

Cas had never learned to sleep in the first place. He came into human life already frayed at the edges, already enough nightmare fuel to make sleep an exercise in futility. In addition, it appeared that Cas, either through some joke of the universe or as a leftover from Jimmy’s mind, experienced exploding head syndrome, a phenomenon which started out as profoundly terrifying until it progressed to just one more annoyance. It was a good thing that fully-powered angels didn’t sleep, he reflected once after jerking awake, the phantom noise still ringing in his head as his hand automatically gripped the blade next to his bed. If something like that had happened when he still had his grace his instinctual reaction might have been catastrophic. As it stood, Cas simply kept blades by the bed instead of firearms, and so far had avoided disaster.

 

The thing he hated most about sleeping were the dreams. Cas could remember walking within Dean’s dreams, watching his nightmares, but Cas was wholly unprepared to experience these things himself. As an angel he had imagined that dreams were, while not logical by human standards, still largely understandable, a mishmash of stressors and desires that could all be easily parsed in morning light. And maybe some dreams were that way, but never Castiel’s; his were always vague, disorienting, still somehow terrifying. He could never articulate what had been so frightening once he was awake, drenched in sweat and shaking, and that made it all the more frustrating. Keeping a dream journal did nothing but disturb him further when he read his barely recognizable scrawl in the morning, so he stopped, and learned how to bridge himself on caffeine from nap to nap. He slept better during the day, when he could wake up to light and sun, and at night, he distracted himself.

 

Often, Cas would talk to Anna. He knew she couldn’t really hear him and that talking to her was even more fruitless than a human talking to a gravestone, but it comforted him in the way that prayer was supposed to comfort. Sometimes he wrote her letters and buried them in the earth or burned them in a candle, sometimes he walked outside and tipped his face up to the stars and spoke out loud in a low, quiet voice. He ranged from conversational, sharing a story about the brewing Winchester prank war or how Dean had begun to teach him to drive, to so existential he could barely understand his own metaphors anymore. It was ridiculous to feel warm, safe, like he had a familiar hand on his shoulder, but he felt it anyway.

 

Sam would tell him later that it was also very human to feel that way, with a look that was almost like jealousy, but too weary to quite make it, and Cas was reminded that Sam had once believed in God. Cas quietly and somewhat irrationally added Sam’s loss of faith to his mental list of things to feel guilty about, with the faint memory of an angel intoning _Sam of course is an abomination_ filed as evidence. That one, at least, was technically not Cas’s fault, but now that he was human, any contribution to stealing that comfort Sam might have had once, even if it was false, seemed like a crime.

 

He did not talk about these things with Dean-- or rather, Dean did not talk about these things with him-- either way, it was just not what they did. They orbited each other quietly at night, both trying to avoid waking Sam while trying to push the night towards the sunrise as quickly as possible. Sometimes they would watch the television on mute, lagging subtitles flashing across the bottom of the screen, Dean’s head on Cas’s thigh while Cas smoothed his hair. A few memorable times, they baked in the kitchen, hushing each other’s muffled laughter, flour settling around them in a fine mist. Sam would walk into the kitchen at daybreak, bemused and still partially asleep, accepting the snickerdoodle or meringue or peanut butter cookie when Dean popped it into his mouth. More often, one or the other of them would stumble out, still shaking and confused from nightmares, and the other would quietly leave a cup of coffee behind before drifting off to the next room.

 

It had always been strange, what Cas and Dean had, strange and tentative while somehow being so far from fragile, and the strangeness only increased now that Cas was human. It seemed like they were constantly on the brink of something, but neither of them knew how to step forward, and so their “thing” (as Dean would call it) existed primarily in the quiet in-between space after midnight. Someday it would be able to withstand the daylight, but they both needed time. Or maybe they didn’t, maybe it had been time for years and they were both afraid. Cas wasn’t sure and he didn’t know how to ask. But if there was one thing Cas knew about this “thing,” it was that it had a profound sense of inevitability, and one morning they did emerge into the daylight to let the dawn see them with hands clasped. It was no groundbreaking revelation, and effectively it changed almost nothing, but it felt comfortable, an acceptance far too long in coming. Cas wondered out loud why they had ever waited at all, and Dean laughed, realizing that he almost couldn’t remember.

  
Life eventually moved on enough that Cas no longer felt trapped in limbo, still somehow making the transition from angel to human long after his grace was gone. He never really improved at sleeping, but if the rituals and routines surrounding the insomnia weren’t comfortable, they were at least constant, and interspersed with reminders that he wasn’t alone.


End file.
